'26 Hurricane 'Like A Devil's Wheel'

September 20, 1986

SIXTY YEARS ago, on Sept. 16, a Saturday, a six-day tropical hurricane was bearing down on Miami. The storm was about 300 miles in diameter and it was revolving at incredible speed (instruments broke) about a center eye 50 miles across, where winds were calm, with gales spinning off from the slow forward movement that ground down all but superior man-made objects like a devil's wheel. The storm cut a swath targeting Miami diagonally northwest across Florida until it beat itself out on the iron hills of Alabama.

Highlights: Jerome Cherbino and his wife were drowned in bed on the second story of their mansion on a bay island. A huge, iron-hulled schooner was grounded near The Miami News tower building. The new downtown, 14-story Meyer-Kaiser Bank building leaned so far over a busy intersection that it had to be taken down brick by brick, and rebuilt four stories.

The modest dwellings that lined N.W. 36th Street, the main route to the airport, were smashed, spilling bedding and household goods in the paved street. All that survived of most wrecked houses were the bathrooms opened up with walls torn away, bathtub, lavatory and commode firmly rooted by plumbing to concrete.

My parents and siblings survived when their new house was breaking up by burrowing like animals under a fallen tree trunk. I was at my summer job at Jackson Memorial Hospital, which was heavily damaged and lost the nurses' dormitory annex.There were 372 officially listed fatalities, but bodies were found in wreckage for weeks afterward.

Martial law was declared, National Guardsmen patrolled, and some hotels and restaurants were reopened by government and the Red Cross. We ate free meals and groused about the heavily chorinated drinking water.